1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data transfer between a host system and an input/output (I/O) storage device. More specifically, the present invention provides a method by which data is accessed, at a faster rate, from non-volatile or persistent memory instead of magnetic media on a mechanical storage device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Operating Systems in particular have needs of inspecting certain areas of a storage device, such as a hard disk drive, to gather information vital to the process of starting up the system. For example, to install the Advanced Interactive Executive (AIX™) operating system, the Volume Group Descriptor Area (VGDA), among other things, has to be accessed. Since a hard disk drive is a mechanical storage device, this requires that the disk spins and the read/write head(s) be positioned to read the data. This creates a delay caused by the time it takes to start the disk's motors, to position the reading heads, and to perform the read.
The I/O wait associated with mechanical storage devices is not a critical concern unless the system has a significant number of drives. For example, a system may have thousands of hard disk drives. In this case, inspection of these drives could take hours, creating a performance problem. However, even in the case of a single mechanical storage device, as with a typical personal computer, the I/O wait may be a nuisance.
There is no current solution to avoid this I/O wait as described above. Hard disk drives and other mechanical storage media, such as optical drives and tape drives, for example, do not currently have a way to maintain, across power and reset cycles, a copy of data stored in disk sectors.